While the term “real estate porn” describes our ecstatic obsession with the ways in which a handful of lucky people get to live and the rest of us generally don’t, there seems to be no obvious term to characterize the literature that limns the trouble that invariably takes place inside fictional houses, whether they are claustrophobic, haunted or simply falling apart. But when we enter a walled space inside a novel, we often expect, and in fact go out of our way to seek, trouble.
And even in our dreams, houses often offer more than we had thought was there: a corridor we hadn’t known about, a hidden wing. When we fantasize about other people’s houses, whether they’re online or on TV shows or around the corner from where we live, we seem to imagine them as gleaming-surfaced oases of tranquillity.
UNSHELTERED By Barbara Kingsolver 480 pp.
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